Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

The Timberlake did no business to speak of. The students never went there, the faculty rarely, and Negroes weren’t welcome. It was a place for Quinsyburg’s old people — veiled like outdated fabrics and wrapped in woolen stuffs — who stopped in, wordlessly hung up their coats, and then took their plates of boiled fish and glasses of water alone. On this particular evening, the dining-room was empty as usual but for one black waiter, several old ladies crunching breadsticks, and the unmistakable figure, hunched in a bib, of President Greatracks alone in a corner gulching a mound of meat. He had seen Darconville come in but only winked, wiped his oily chin, and fell again upon his meats and puddings as if to defeat them. Ordinarily, he would have come over and talked the runners off a pung. He obviously had other plans. But congeniality, even at the best of times, was not a big number at the Timberlake Hotel. Nor had Darconville chosen the place by chance. You see, it was absolutely impossible to have a celebration there, so it was the perfect place to have a celebration if you were never coming back. For Darconville, incidentally, there was no question whatsoever about that. But unfortunately he was now facing another.

“I’m sorry.”

“You must be tired,” said Darconville. Was it a joke? If so, it was a joke that hurt him badly. But he smiled.

“I’m sorry.”

“You’ve been overexcited by it all.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Please,” asked Darconville, leaning forward, “what is the matter with you?”

“You.”

“What’s the matter with me?”

“Me,” she whispered.

Darconville touched her hand and frowned, feeling clownish and homely and old. He was embarrassed. He didn’t know what to say. Do you really love me ? When love isn’t proof of itself, it is suddenly impossible to prove — and words, which fit to fill the mouths of myst and mummer alike, cheapen on the tongue. And how many of them, to mock about meaning with mendaciloquence! No, if weeds were orchids, thought Darconville, people would come to hate orchids rather than cultivate weeds. But words were weeds, weren’t they? They can mean their opposite! If I should cleave, must I then embrace this girl or be let to cut her into twigs? Let? Choose, it can mean both hinder and allow. Avaunt beckons and banishes, both, and hostis , why, it indicates a guest and indicates an enemy! Foundlings are lostlings! Do you really love me ? I do, and so must loathe her, he thought, fashioning thus the truth that grows expedient, becoming Cato’s lie. Question: Are you faithful to your husband? Answer: I wouldn’t be with you— there , for manifold ambiguity to say that one deserved condign punishment is tautological; to say that one does not deserve it is a contradiction in terms. What of language, then, when opposites pip each other into life as faith will doubt and love will hate? If Moses was the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, then he must have been the daughter of Pharaoh’s son. Why, pluck out words that mean what they are, and language shan’t have a tooth left to mump on beans! Do you really love me ? It was a question, thought Darconville, that fully deserved the wrong answer — but, what, making it then, if language interpreted as it did, the right one? O wonderful world, when we can’t mean what we say! But wait, perhaps she asks what she too well knows and therefore doesn’t know at all, as a person goes blind to the riddle of familiar landscapes or sits deaf as a post listening in the depths of that infirmity to try to hear more of the promiscuous roar she can’t see has caused and now prevents it. Good! I will outparadox paradox, thought Dar-conville, juggle intentions like balls, and make foundlings of lostlings all over again! Opportunity is being ready for it! Checkmate!

“I want to marry you,” said Darconville.

The statement was simple. It didn’t subdichotomize. It didn’t subdivide. It seemed to Isabel as far from danger as she was from reason and as near to love as she was now from folly. She felt strangely calm, almost in the swoon of satisfaction that is at the last stage of penance fully made. It was a moment to cherish, there in that ghastly hotel, when perhaps for the first time in her entire life that vision which she feared waited for her forked and misanointed in the middle distance now came to the fore an angel of deliverance, its open hand gentle to the possibility of it. It was so easy. There was suddenly confusion in neither concern nor context: here was a person who loved her, a friend to console her, a protector to keep her safe from the close world of mouse-fretting worries and major disappointments she’d lived with so long but could no more. If one did something, she saw, one didn’t have to wait anymore. She wouldn’t — she couldn’t — wait anymore. There was nothing to remember. The statement was simple. There was nothing to forget.

“Wait,” said Darconville, swiftly interrupting himself to comply with apprehension before it rose to overwhelm him, “if you want to. You may want to spend some time alone, you may want more schooling, your parents—”

Isabel’s head was lowered, shadowed in a slant of candleshade. It has been said that the happiest conversation is that of which nothing is remembered, and, if so, whether a longer reply led up to what he heard, Darconville couldn’t say, but he would never forget that moment when she looked up suddenly with moist brown eyes, paused, and whispered softly, “I want — what you want.”

“When?”

“September.”

“Where?”

Isabel fixed her eyes on him tenderly, her bosom upwelling with the tears she tried in vain, by swallowing, to absorb. “Where we were engaged.”

A stone suddenly rolled away from his heart.

“I have to confess something,” she said, smiling through the tears that fell and pressing the back of her fingers against his cheek. “I’ve always wanted since I was little to make my own wedding dress.”

The driving rain outside — a sudden gowkstorm had blown up during the evening — turned the lobby of the Timberlake even darker than usual, the heavy curtains over the windows flapping about now in the room like the huge wings of angry birds. They had stayed on rather late, and Darconville, concerned about Isabel’s curfew, was wondering how they’d get to the car. Hugging two empty champagne bottles, Isabel laughed that she didn’t care and that she didn’t mind getting wet and that, having claimed earlier at Fitts that she planned to go to Fawx’s Mt., she’d signed out for an “overnight” anyway.

They waited on in some merriment, with Isabel gladdened to the heart and Darconville feeling a certain continual power, a sense of being attentive enough to a minute survey of the worth of real life that he might have been perpetually a poet. At that moment he looked through the window and saw a woman outside in the midst of the downpour. She was running up the front steps holding up a pink umbrella and an overnight bag. It was Mrs. Dodypol! Whether Isabel recognized her he couldn’t say, but as the poor woman stumbled through the front door of the hotel with an alcoholic lurch and a fright of hairloops stuck messily to a face the color of margarine he saw how very much she evoked Isabel’s sympathy — Isabel pressed close to Darconville.

“I love you for that. You care,” he said, thinking of his own general indifference to that faculty wife, “sometimes far more, I’m sorry to say, than I.”

Mrs. Dodypol, signing the register, quickly disappeared upstairs when Isabel turned to Darconville and, winking, whispered playfully, “Or is it me?”